


Lab Space

by KennaM



Category: Big Hero 6 (2014)
Genre: Gen, Growing Up, Introspection, Laboratories, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-14 11:07:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4562310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KennaM/pseuds/KennaM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tadashi wants to be an inventor, and every inventor needs a proper lab.</p><p>Hiro wants to be just like his older brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lab Space

At twelve years of age, Tadashi Hamada finally – _finally_ – convinces his Aunt Cass to let him turn her garage into a makeshift lab. She moves the truck that she rarely ever drives out onto the street, temporarily, and reminds him that if he wants to have his own lab, he’ll have to set it up himself. She’s far too busy in the café to help him haul everything he needs from his shared bedroom down to the garage, where he’d already begun storing the machines he bought with science fair prize money, after it was determined there was no space for them in the living room.

Hiro follows him up and down the stairs to watch what’s going on, which annoys Tadashi until he realizes he can pass his five-year-old brother armfuls of textbooks and project notes and have him help. He asks what Tadashi is working on this time, and Tadashi tells him it’s going to be a proper lab, where he can work on his programs and inventions without being cooped up in their tiny bedroom all day. It’s going to be the whole garage, not just the truck’s workbench, or the cluttered desk in the corner of their bedroom, or the too-small computer table shoved to the side in the living room.

Tadashi knows Hiro likes to watch him work, and he’s so impressed by what his baby brother has managed to pick up on. The kid can write computer language almost as easily as he can write English, will notice the little electrical problems in Tadashi’s inventions before Tadashi flips the power switch and watches it fry. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to be encouraging this or not, but Aunt Cass seems to think it’s OK, so he lets Hiro design his own robot toys so they can work on them together, sometime.

The garage lab doesn’t look as good as he was hoping, when he manages to get all his stuff down there. There are more boxes than anything else, and not enough workspace besides the bench and a card table he found when he shoved all of Aunt Cass’s storage up into the rafters. There’s so much floor space now that the truck’s finally out of here, he doesn’t know what to do with it all. Without another computer he can’t actually do any programming work down here, and without a few more worktables he stuck with just using the floor, which he can’t do with Hiro around.

But it’s a start, and Tadashi swells with pride whenever he opens the garage door again to make sure it’s really there. His own laboratory. For years he’s seen science labs on TV shows and known that’s what he needed to be an inventor, like he wanted to be. And it may not be perfect, but it’s his. 

* * *

Hiro is helping out in the café during school break when Mrs. Akiyama waves him over, asks if he can grab another scone for her, and if he might for any reason want a used two-seater couch. She’s trying to get rid of it but it’s still perfectly useable, doesn’t have any gross stains or anything, and she could donate it to charity but knows the Hamada brothers are always looking for anything they could use.

It takes him half a minute to mentally rearrange the garage space and decide that a small couch would fit perfectly by the water heater, and tells her yes, he wants it.

He has to convince Tadashi to come pick it up with him since there’s no way he and Mrs. Akiyama can carry it down the street in the freezing cold, and Aunt Cass insists she’s too busy to drive them. Tadashi got his license a few months ago, however, and has been driving Aunt Cass’s truck more often than she has. Usually to give his friends rides, since his self-built moped doesn’t have the room, or to haul sports equipment around. He frowns when Hiro says there’s something they need to pick up, but goes along with it.

Tadashi and Mrs. Akiyama shove the thing into the bed of the truck while Hiro watches, anxious, from the curb. He stares at it through the back window during the short drive back to the café, as if something could happen to it while Tadashi doubles back around the block. They hadn’t tied it down and he’s worried about the angle, even though he did the calculations in his head and knows there’s no way it’s falling out.

Hiro unlocks the garage while Tadashi struggles to get the thing out in the alleyway. The couch fits, just as he thought, perfectly in the back alcove by the water heater. Tadashi isn’t sure, worries it’s a fire hazard, but Hiro’s thought of that too, and slumps across the couch cushions to inspect their lab from his new vantage point. Tadashi fakes sitting on top of him.

They’d bought a 3D printer the summer before, depleting almost all of their combined savings for the machine so they’d never have to buy spare parts again. Two rolls of filament goes through the rest of their savings and Tadashi keeps tight control of the machine so they don’t waste the money. The machine is theirs, not his, but Tadashi is the mature responsible one, so he’s in charge of it.

The 3D printer was the only thing that was jointly theirs. The desktop computer is Tadashi’s, most of the tools in the drawers are Tadashi’s, even the spare parts and the chairs at the desks had been saved by Tadashi from a junkyard. Hiro brought down his old laptop, and stapled up his favorite movie posters and art prints to make the garage feel more like home. Those are his. The 3D printer is theirs. And now, so is the couch.

The couch is Hiro’s first real contribution and for the first time, the garage lab finally feels like _his_. Not Tadashi’s, with Hiro’s stuff covering the walls in a false claim, but Tadashi’s _and_ Hiro’s. He’s barely nine years old and has been using the lab for years, since Aunt Cass finally got over her fear of letting the boys stay out there alone and unsupervised together, and it no longer feels like he’s intruding on his brother’s space anymore 

* * *

Classes haven’t even started when Tadashi gets the email about his lab assignment. He put in, along with eighty other freshmen and upperclassmen, for one of the five private labs left in the robotics building, and according to the email he got one.

Aunt Cass offers to help move his stuff over, but he politely declines. He wants to have time in his new lab alone, to familiarize himself with the space he’ll be working in for the next four years, without worrying about explaining what everything is to her. Not that he doesn’t love his family; he particularly appreciates the interest Aunt Cass shows in his work, though he knows she doesn’t fully understand it. But he’s opening a new chapter of his life. He wants to see what this chapter holds for him before he shows it to his aunt and his brother.

The SFIT lab is about the same size as his garage, but feels bigger because it’s less crowded. Empty shelves sit against one wall and there’s a single computer on a desk, and nothing more. He has to requisition equipment from the department, his advisor explains, before he can really get started on any projects, and that whole process takes up the first week of open lab time. When he isn’t doing paperwork, he’s doing research for his first major project.

Tadashi doesn’t realize that he hasn’t been in the garage all week until he notices a slightly hurt expression cross Hiro’s face at dinner, when they’re talking about school. Hiro just started high school, way too young in Tadashi’s opinion, and comes home right away to spend the afternoon working on homework in the garage lab. Alone. Tadashi, on the other hand, has assigned lab hours at SFIT, and spends extra hours there trying to get a jump start on all his assignments. Also alone.  

It’s actually, Tadashi thinks, the first time he’s had his own space since his parents died. Before then, he and Hiro had separate bedrooms; at Aunt Cass’s, they’ve always shared. He’d deluded himself for about a month, thinking the garage lab was his alone, but even then Hiro was always there with him.

And now that Tadashi actually has that separate space, he craves it. He’s never had much trouble making friends, but at SFIT the other freshmen notice how he’s the only one with a private lab, and he’s content to close the door behind him and lock himself away all afternoon. For the first time, Tadashi worries that he’s cutting people out of his life.

He heads down to the garage later that night. Hiro quickly closes something on the computer before Tadashi can see, which would worry him if his eighteenth birthday wasn’t a week away, and he gives Hiro an exaggerated suspicious look, to which Hiro responds with a giant grin. He doesn’t have the tools here to work on any of his major projects, a weird feeling, but he has his moped, and that’s been his standby project for years. The two of them fall into an easy rhythm again.

* * *

When the department of robotics decides to give Hiro the same lab Tadashi used, he isn’t sure what to say. He hadn’t expected it. He’d explained to the academic advisor that he was restarting his brother’s old project, but assumed they’d just stick him in the giant shared lab space with the others. He is a freshman, after all.

His faculty mentor explains that no one else requested the room, and the department heads agreed that it only made sense to let Hiro have it. None of the students seemed to be complaining either; the upperclassmen had gotten so used to using the shared space they didn’t feel they needed all that extra room, and most of the underclassmen had been there at the showcase. All they’d lost was hard work.

Aunt Cass offers to help move his stuff over, but he doesn’t have time to turn her down because Wasabi’s doing it for him. Go Go and Fred are already putting boxes in the van, and last Hiro saw Honey she was filling out requisition forms for all the lab equipment she remembered Tadashi needing. It’s weird having so many friends, Hiro’s not used to it. He wants to be.

The lab is exactly like he remembers it, and nothing like he remembers it. It’s been cleaned out over the summer, everything that wasn’t Tadashi’s returned to the department, everything that was now sitting in boxes on the floor. The team helps Hiro unpack, refilling shelves before they have to leave for classes, and after they leave he moves things around until it’s just as it was, all those months ago, when Hiro was here before. He even tapes the posters up just the way Tadashi had them.

Because, really, this is Tadashi’s lab. Hiro knows that. It’s just like all those years ago, when Tadashi had rearranged the garage and called it his own, and Hiro had stubbornly insisted they were sharing this, too. Once again Tadashi is sharing his lab with Hiro, but not just his lab – his school, his friends, his research.

The only thing of Hiro’s is the large red gauntlet, perfectly fitted into one of the cardboard boxes, and even that isn’t just his. He’d designed and built it for Baymax, the only thing Tadashi had really left behind for him besides the hat, and Hiro had tried to make that his own, too. Now their final joint project is gone, and Hiro knows that no matter how well he programs his replacement, it won’t be the same.

He sets the gauntlet up by the window, a prominent spot, where he’ll see it every day. It’s a reminder of what he’s lost, as well as what he’s striving to obtain. Tadashi may be gone but it’s his lab, where his dream was born, and Hiro will have to work days and nights but he’ll see that dream reborn. It was always Tadashi _and_ Hiro who were going to change the world, never just Hiro alone.

The gauntlet is still curled in a fist and Hiro makes one with his own hand, and bumps it up against the carbon fiber fingers in memory of earlier days. He turns to leave, until something catches his eye.


End file.
